Co-Development News & Articles

Alex Ferguson is widely regarded as the greatest soccer coach of all time. As the manager of England’s Manchester United, he led it to one of the top valuations in sports, $3.17 billion, according to Forbes Magazine. Prior to Ferguson, Manchester United had failed to win a title in two decades. When Ferguson took over, United unleashed sheer and utter domination on the soccer world, to the tune of 13 league championships and 25 other domestic and international trophies. That’s twice as many as the next most-successful manager of any British team. Apple had Steve Jobs. Soccer had Alex Ferguson.…

At Integrant, we do business differently because our CEO did business with many, many vendors over a decade working on “the client side,” with dozens of vendors, trying to crack the code of finding the right one and then making the relationship work. So here in marketing, we wanted to offer some “boots on the ground” insight from Yousef Awad, our CEO, about what motivates his values as a vendor and how the fact that he spent so many years as a client made a difference when he jumped ship from client-side to vendor-side. We also suspected he might have…

Like many custom software development companies, Integrant outsources, but with an eye toward quality, not cost. We sat down with our CEO, Yousef Awad, to ask him about the genesis of Integrant development centers overseas. As a U.S. headquartered software development firm, why did you choose to establish offshore development centers versus onshore? YA: When we started in ’92 offshoring wasn’t part of the plan. With the 90s came a massive shortage of developers in the States, especially with the dot com boom. As our business grew we faced challenges in the ability to hire and retain talented software developers…

Partnership isn’t just a word. It’s a set of actions, values, and commitments. We asked our CEO, Yousef Awad, to talk about partnership—what it looks like, how to achieve it, and when to call it quits. Q: What does your ideal client partnership look like? Why? YA: Structurally, our ideal client is a company that has a software team that is working on multiple projects and is in need of expanding at certain points to meet its project timeline. While companies work in many different industries, the group we are working with is technical in nature. Culturally, our ideal client…

By: Salah Ahmad & Ahmed Badawi Microsoft unveiled the future of TypeScript at its Build Conference this past April. If you’re not familiar, TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. Microsoft started the TypeScript project because they were getting a lot of feedback from internal users and external customers that writing large applications in JavaScript is hard, and because writing large applications in JavaScript is pretty much unavoidable, they want to help the JavaScript community to make it easier. Microsoft’s guiding principle behind building TypeScript was: The best way to help the JavaScript community is…

According to Integrant’s CEO Yousef Awad, teamwork and communication are the foundation of achievement and the key to continuous growth. For Integrant, this is represented by Tech2Tech. Below, an interview with Yousef: Q: What is Tech2Tech and what is the genesis of this concept? Tech2Tech is two technical teams working together simultaneously. The main idea is that software engineers have their own specific language and understanding. It is due to their background and understanding that they are able to communicate with each other, and this communication is what it takes to deliver a product, especially since running a custom software development…

Every year, thousands of developers and other interested parties flock to the Build conference, hosted by Microsoft. I represented Integrant at Build 2015 in San Francisco and was impressed with the extent to which Microsoft is embracing other platforms in exciting ways. It’s not news that Microsoft’s .NET has been a closed framework. It offered few options but was simple and easy to control. The fact that the software giant is willing to work with and support platforms other than its own in the cloud was frankly shocking at first-- with many skeptical or questioning Microsoft’s strategy. The Windows Universal…

In theory, using an offshore, outsourced software development team sounds great, since it’s hard to recruit and retain local talent. Adding people from another location supposedly gives you the flexibility of faster ramp ups, ramping down when you need to, and access to good technical talent. The problem is that it’s not that easy. You must consider the overhead of collaborating while living in two different time zones, the challenges of communicating with people you’ve never met, and that unsettling feeling that you aren’t accurately measuring the productivity of staff you can’t see. We refer to it as the “productivity…

While we all work under the principles of Agile development, each software development team adopts its own modifications to Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), or Lean, to name a few. With years of trial and error, working for many different types of clients on a range of projects, we’ve learned a few lessons about what works well for distributed teams. We co-develop with client teams based in the U.S. while our teams work from Amman and Cairo. Here are two examples of what has worked well for us and may help you in an outsourced, offshore, near-shore, or distributed custom software…

One of the most important qualities differentiating one custom software developer from another is engineering talent. Companies that seek to extend their internal engineering teams by outsourcing software development are going to be especially concerned with ensuring their external engineers are not just good, but great. We have a very specific recipe for what makes a great engineer: passion + discipline + communication + collaboration + education. Passion to Solve Problems Great engineers must be passionate about using technology to solve problems. In a production system, great engineers have a comprehensive understanding of the system’s architecture and what it’s doing. They…